A Delay-Aware Adaptation Framework for Cloud Gaming Under the Computation Constraint of User Devices

Abstract

Cloud gaming has emerged as a new trend in the gaming industry, bringing a lot of benefits to both players and service providers. In cloud gaming, it is essential to ensure low end-to-end delay for good use experience. Hence, sufficient computational resources must be available at the client in order to process video in a timely manner. However, thin clients such as mobile devices generally have limited computation capabilities. Thus, the available computational resources may be insufficient to support the client, such as in case of low battery. In this paper, we propose a new adaptation framework for resource-constrained cloud gaming clients. The proposed framework combines frame skipping at the server and frame discarding at the client according to available computational resources of the client. Experiment results show that the proposed framework can significantly improve video quality given a delay constraint compared to conventional methods.